After we'd finished, the Bandit took out a small knife, a piece of paper and a pen. He asked me once again if I wanted to be his blood brother. He had tears in his eyes as he prepared himself for my rejection.
I thought carefully for a while, then told him my real fear, the fear that I couldn't live up to his expectations. I took my six brothers for granted. I had never considered how best to be a good brother.
He laughed at that, and said he loved me for who I was.
I relented. We cut our fingers and dropped some blood into a cup of rice wine and shared the same drink together. We then made up a poem. The rhythm and the sounds of the Chinese words were beautiful, and we worked on it for over an hour. We knew our friendship would be special-life at the academy was so lonely and so tough, the only thing we had was friendship. When the Bandit and I became blood brothers, we knew we were establishing a bond that would ensure our emotional survival for the next few years.
That year, the different academies in our university selected even more students, and our complex in the countryside just wasn't big enough to accommodate them all. So Madame Mao ordered each academy to go back to its old location in the city. We were told to pack our few belongings, because we would be moving out when we returned from our next three-week summer holiday, which would be spent with the workers at a garment factory outside Beijing.
Unlike our academy in the countryside, our new city site was much smaller and very cramped. Boys and girls occupied different sections on the second floor of a three-storey building, with eight students sleeping in each small room. We slept in four-bed bunks with one tiny drawer for our personal belongings. Anything that didn't fit there would have to be stored under our bed. We would share those poky little rooms until we graduated.
We had a new director now too. And there were more new teachers.
On the first day in our new academy, we were told we would have a new ballet teacher, Xiao Shuhua.
Teacher Xiao was a small boyish-looking man. Other teachers called him by his nickname, Woa Woa, which meant baby. "I'm excited to work with you," he said to us in the first class. "Although I'm your teacher, I'm also your friend. We will work together and learn together, and make our classes fun. Not only will I teach you ballet steps, I'll also try to teach you the appreciation of ballet. Ballet is the most beautiful art form in the world. I hope, by the time I'm finished with you, you'll have the same appreciation. We should know each other's strengths and also our weaknesses. For a start, I want all of you to know that your new ballet teacher can't turn. I have the worst pirouettes in the world!"
Teacher Xiao was a happy man with a quick temperament. His happiness and emotions fluctuated depending on how his students performed. He encouraged us to write down our achievements, mistakes, new discoveries, even the combination of dance steps, every day, in our diaries. He was intolerant of laziness and lack of commitment. He would fume with anger if we didn't remember the dance combinations or his individual corrections. But he was also quick to praise and to demonstrate. He had a breathtakingly enormous jump and he was very lean and fit. He always carried a notebook to his classes, with every step and every combination written down in detail.
Although Teacher Xiao's own turning ability was poor, he was determined to help his students perfect their turns, so he embarked on months of turning classes. We would complete our barre work within fifteen minutes and the rest of the two hours would be all pirouettes. The first thing he wanted to tackle was our fear of turning. Sometimes I felt the whole universe spinning around me when I walked out of these classes. Many nights I dreamt about doing multiple pirouettes and the feeling was incredibly exhilarating. It was like a "millet dream", I thought. There was a well-cited fable in China which Teacher Xiao repeated to us many times:
A poor Chinese scholar, on his way to the capital to attend the Emperor's annual scholars' competition, suddenly ran out of money. He was still far from Beijing, and now he had no money to hire a horse. He was hungry and tired and as he passed a small, run-down home he smelled a wonderful fragrance coming from within. He knocked on the door and an old lady stood in front of him. He begged her for some food but she was so poor she only had millet soup to offer him. He thanked her and sat in a corner to rest while the soup cooked. He immediately fell asleep and dreamt that he had won the competition and that he would live a wealthy and happy life with many wives, concubines and children. When he woke up from his dream he believed this was his fate, until he glanced at the millet soup cooking in the wok, and realised that he was in truth just an ordinary man and the things he had dreamt were too good to be true.
"Great things don't come easily!" Teacher Xiao insisted and I thought of his unattainable pirouettes. We worked on three consecutive turns for over a year. It seemed impossible to master. The perfect balance on a high demi-pointe, the shape of the hands, the crisp spotting with our heads, the turn-out of both legs, straight back, pressed-down shoulders-the coordination of all these elements together. So many things to remember! For a long time, it seemed that we would never achieve more than three pirouettes but still Teacher Xiao worked us tirelessly, day in and day out.
Teacher Xiao didn't seem to notice me much in the first two classes. I was shy and physically underdeveloped. He seemed to think I was the one with the least interesting face and couldn't understand why I had been chosen in the first place. But during our third class he apparently noticed something unusual about my eyes. He began to try to find out what kind of boy I was. The more he found out, the more interested he became. He discovered that I remembered every word he said, as long as I was interested. So he made me interested in ballet, and quickly realised that I didn't cope well with forceful shouting, which was common practice among the teachers at the Beijing Dance Academy. Instead I responded well to gentle encouragement. He noticed every subtle improvement I made. He made sure that I knew he'd noticed. He gently and gradually led me into the intricacies of ballet, nurtured me, dealt with my self-doubt and inadequacies with encouragement, and slowly moved me from the back of the class to the front.
Apart from more and more ballet, we also started geography and history classes that year. We spent very little time on international geography. Our teacher tried hard to mention America as little as possible and no one took his class seriously, but I wanted to know about the other countries, even though I had to hide my interest. Our history class also dwelt mainly on China, but here I found the rise and fall of the different Chinese dynasties fascinating, especially the Tang and Ming dynasties with their great art, crafts, porcelain, medicine and splendid poetry.
We had a new teacher for our politics class too that term, Chen Shulian, but we really only studied communist history and Mao's political ideas. We were starved of knowledge from anywhere outside of China. We learnt a little about Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but only as a backdrop to Mao's great political achievements. "Our Chairman Mao is the one who has brought Marx's communist philosophy to life!" Chen Shulian told us one day. "He is leading us to the first stage of communism."
"Are we in the first stage of communism now?" a student asked.
"Yes, but this is a long road. We have to work hard at it."
Another hand was raised. "What is the final stage of communism like?"
"Oh, it is the ultimate wonderland! There is no starvation, no class distinction, no need to work long hours. There will be total equality. Everyone will work willingly and share equally. There will be no greed or laziness, no cheating or unfairness. We will have the best of everything! It will be total happiness!"